


With Fingers Crossed

by track_04



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Godstiel: Cas as God, Prayer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-22
Updated: 2011-05-22
Packaged: 2017-11-14 18:39:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/518312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/track_04/pseuds/track_04
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the way that Dean Winchester prays.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With Fingers Crossed

**Author's Note:**

> Written in a moment of post 6.22-inspired grief. Takes place between Seasons 6 and 7.

Dean never really learned how to pray.

When Dean's mother was alive, the one time in his life he probably stood a chance of really believing, he'd been too young to really understand the idea of prayer. He could remember lying on his back as he fell asleep at night, staring at the ceiling and asking in a soft voice if anyone was there, wondering if he just looked hard enough if the angels his mother was always talking about would come out of hiding. At the time, that had seemed like all prayer really was, a one-sided conversation with something friendly and distant that Dean would never see, no matter how hard he tried.

After his mother died, he sometimes still whispered to the ceiling while his dad was spending another night out on their ratty motel couch with a bottle of jack and a stack of dusty books. The words were usually more desperate questions and pleas than anything, a broken-hearted little boy asking for someone to make things better. But things never got better and no one ever bothered to answer him.

Then Dean stopped talking altogether, and when he started again he didn't bother wasting words on something that didn't exist.

Prayer was nothing more than something that people did in lieu of helping themselves, an excuse not to fix their own shit and instead leave it all up to some unseen force. If there was one thing that Dean had learned from his Dad, it was to suck it up and take care of your own problems because no one else would do it for you.

Even when he learned that heaven and angels and God were real, Dean still didn't see the point in learning how to pray. The angels--most of them--were the dicks he'd always imagined, and praying to a God who was a poster boy for Deadbeat Dads everywhere just seemed pointless. It made him feel justified, really.

The only time in his adult life that Dean ever really bothered to make an actual effort at prayer was over the past year, and Dean wasn't even sure that counted. Praying to an angel--a specific, hopeless, sometimes asshole of an angel--seemed more like the equivalent of cosmic text messaging than actual prayer. Even if Dean didn't really know how to pray, he was pretty sure that proper prayer didn't involve telling someone not to be a dick or asking them to get their feathery ass over to where you were to lend a hand fixing your latest problem.

So, yeah, Dean had never really learned how to pray.

But Dean was a Winchester, and Winchesters were all about doing things in the most backward way possible. Which meant that it only made sense that now that prayer was the last thing that Dean should have been doing, he found himself doing it all the time and to the last person--no, _being_ \--that he should have been.

It was like a reflex that he couldn't stop. He'd be sitting at Bobby's table, pouring over musty books, trying to find something in the lore about how to depower a souped up angel, and he'd suddenly think, _It's supposed to rain tomorrow, Cas. I hope you have your umbrella._ Or he'd be lying on a saggy motel mattress drinking a beer, listening to Sam sleep fitfully across the room, and before he knew it he'd be thinking _Man, Cas, you should have seen the way our waitress was hitting on Sam today. She must have been 60--the look on his face was priceless_. Or he'd be finishing up a salt and burn--because ghosts didn't stop for the almost Apocalypse, so they sure as hell weren't going to stop just because Dean's family was going to shit yet again--and just before he tossed the lighter into the grave he'd think, _They're playing the Dollars Trilogy at the theater here. I'll pay for admission if you buy the popcorn_.

It was always something stupid and random and innocuous, nothing that never really gave away their plans or where they were any more than Castiel probably already knew, but he hated himself a little bit more every time it happened. He hated that some part of his brain couldn't separate Cas from _Castiel_ and whatever it was that he'd become. He hated that an even bigger part of himself didn't want to make that separation, didn't want to--no, _couldn't_ believe that Cas as he knew him didn't exist anymore.

Cas was family and that meant that he was still there, that they--that Dean--could still save him. Because Dean didn't give up on family. Ever. And Cas not being there somewhere, waiting for them to save him just wasn't an option.

And that was probably why he couldn't stop his weak attempts at prayer to a friend he wasn't sure was even able to listen anymore.

Sometimes he thought that maybe it was a good thing he'd never really learned how to pray properly. Because prayers, real prayers, were meant for gods and angels, and he hadn't thought of Cas as the latter for a long, long time, and he'd never be able to believe he was the former. He refused to believe that what he was doing, that the things he sometimes told Cas without thinking, were anything more than conversations with a friend.


End file.
